A Sunday afternoon: two parents, concerned that their children have a broad education, have taken them to a contemporary Art exhibition in a gallery. They enjoy the experience and the children may even have been inspired by the show, which has cost them nothing. The artist, meanwhile, will probably have had to pay for the use of the gallery, while the visitors may well think that the artist has been paid to show their work. For it is work and artists need to eat, be clothed and housed, and if they wish, bring up children, whilst still working as artists. The gallery director and staff are paid but who pays the artist?

However, whenever a conversation takes place about the proposition that artists should receive remuneration for the work they do, a member of the general public is likely to recall a world-famous artist who never received any in their lifetime and that is supposed to be the end of the argument. In fact, the struggling artist was an innovation of the twentieth century and, before that, various forms of state funding were available, aristocratic patronage being effectively, state funding. This has long since died out. So has the nineteenth-century market provided by its newly-affluent bourgeoisie. However, there was a tremendous expansion in art college provision in the nineteen-sixties and questions began to be asked by some of the people going through the process about their position in British society and their possible means of making a living.

Artists began to take measures to help themselves. In 1969 artists, some of whom worked from studios in the old St Katherine’s Dock before its development, named the ‘I’ Site, the first SPACE studios, established A.I.R. (Art Information Registry), an information service for the promotion of the arts from an office in Stepney Green. Its Registry constituted an artist’s index containing information on artist’s work, working techniques and material and of persons and organisations active in the arts. ‘CATALYST’, the first published registry and news sheet of activities from 1969 to 71 became AIRMAIL in 1972-3. The list was used by organisations all over Britain. The Registry offices were moved to Burlington House, home of the Arts Council, the organisation being funded by an Arts Council grant. Some of the same artists were involved in founding another self-help organisation in 1972, the Artists Union. (The Art Information Registry opened a gallery in October 1975 at 125/129 Shaftesbury Avenue but at the same time the Arts Council announced that the grant was not going to be increased).

TATE Archive has acquired most of the records of the national Artists Union which ran from 1972 until 1983. This was the initial working paper:-